Three Things

1. Short D&D and gaming ramble
2. Mississippi is stupid
3. Exercising is kinda tough


Item 1. Over the weekend we played Tomb, Descent, Agricola, and It's Alive. It's alive was new for me, and I enjoyed it a lot. Descent was a marathon session, but we all enjoyed ourselves (most of us did, anyhow). Tomb is generally only half fun for me. The two elements that keep it from being a winner in my book are the somewhat vicious PVP aspect to it, and the difficulty curve, if you will. Basically, its a cut-throat game of looting tombs, where you want to screw the other players before they screw you. Maybe I'm just no good at the game. The difficulty curve that I'm referring to works somewhat like this, for me: Spent a few turns building up your party, raid one or two small tombs. Then, either get hit with a wicked PVP thing that eliminates your best dude, or you just get straight up taken out by monsters in a Tomb. Start over. Moving right along, Agricola is a very clever and fun game, but again, I think I'm just no good at it. I enjoy the resource gathering and management of Puerto Rico, but somehow I don't enjoy the same kind of mechanic in Agricola.

Still working on item 1. Our friend Todd was in town, and it turns out that he's into this retro-clone thing as well, and was running a Sword & Wizardry game at MidsouthCon. That's super cool to me, so I chatted him up as we setup Agricola, and picked his brain for all of the stuff that was working for him. He doesn't use a grid/map/etc for his old school game. We all chatted then about how when most of us started playing D&D, in 2nd edition, we never ever used a 'battlemat', sometimes rough sketches or an occasional diagram, but no grids. But that now, having played 3.x and 4th editions of D&D, the grid system was so firmly entrenched in my brain that it was somewhat difficult to imagine playing D&D without it. But it was cool to chat about it, and seeing Todd running the stuff just added fuel to my fire.

Item 2, Mississippi is stupid. I'm sure TONS of motorists would disagree with me, but I'm an old dude who pays my taxes and appreciates cops, and so I'm all about things that will help to reduce speeding and running red lights. But no, not in Mississippi. Mississippi's government has decided that there will be no 'red light cameras' in the state. I'm disappointed.

And for item 3, I'm doing the P90X workout. Its a hard core workout program that I've borrowed from a friend. I "fooled around with it" last week - tried out two of the routines, and after each, I felt like I'd gotten beat up by Jet Li. This week, I've 'rebooted' and started over, and its going much, much better. Don't get me wrong, its still crazy tough, but now its not severely painful.